INGLORIOUS BASTERDS might be the weirdest big budget studio released film I have ever seen. Though it looks like a WW2 movie Tarantino disagrees and says that it isn’t a WW2 movie at all, I guess in the same vein of Magritte’s painting of a pipe C’nest pa une pipe.
Category: Max von Meyerling
Entertainment
JULIE & JULIA
I missed going to a screening of JULIE AND JULIA because I had written it off as a Type 2 chick flick. For the record, a Type 1 is concerned strictly with who is going with whom. Type 2 is aspirational. I saw a longer preview and suddenly it came to me that director Nora Ephron might have been going for something more here. This is a study of two generations: her parents and her children’s. Parallel lives in different times. This, in the strictest sense, is a comedy of manners.
PUBLIC ENEMIES
Michael Mann’s PUBLIC ENEMIES is a post-911 take on Dillinger. If anything this picture should have been called DILLINGER, or JOHN AND BILLIE except for the fact that the target audience can not be reliably expected to know about anything from before they were born, or at least since they’ve been online. The cheeky bank robber played by Johnny Depp seems to be just even all of the time, as if he’s on Zoloft. Dillinger says what he’s doing is fun be he doesn’t look like he’s having fun. He’s passionately in love but he just looks so, I donno, even. At the end of the picture Dillinger is in the Biograph Theater watching Manhattan Melodrama and as Clark Gable is going to the chair he says something about living fast and dying as he lived and there is a minimalist smile which can almost be discerned in Depp’s lips. I guess in the age of Botox this counts for expressiveness. It’s nothing about 1934.
WHATEVER WORKS
The next time you’re tempted to think of some actor or acting student as being too too precious and effete because they were taking classes on breathing take a look at Larry David’s performance in WHATEVER WORKS. Larry David as Larry David – brilliant! Larry David playing someone other than Larry David – No Apparent Function. Timing is everything in comedy but LD reading someone else’s words becomes an effort to get the words out correctly and only partially funny in the narrow “whine” bandwidth. He even has a look on his face, not the same but analogous to Bush’s moronic smirk, when he managed to get some difficult name nearly right. Larry, I love you but you can’t act. At all.
FOR PETE’S SAKE
I didn’t see this picture, FOR PETE’S SAKE, when it came out because the notion, as the picture was marketed at the time, about Barbra Streisand turning tricks to support her husband, was ugly and prima facia ugly. Now that I’ve seen it I have to say I’m glad I didn’t waste a dollar or how ever much it cost to see a movie at the time. It is flat out awful. Really, it’s nothing more than a series of gags constructed for Babs that are executed on a sub- I Love Lucy level. It’s strange because director Peter Yates has shown himself to be a master of very complicated mise en scene in action films like BULLITT. Here it’s clear that no one working on this picture has the slightest sense of humor.
THE TWONKY
This film was like a living example of LIGHTS OUT, a cautionary tale of the one-eyed monster taking over everybody’s life, controlling consciousness, defining the context of human life all under the aegis of helping mankind. By the end of the decade Rod Serling would have perfected the form and could easily have made The Twonky as a half hour teleplay.
HEAVEN’S GATE
I saw the film when it first came out at a packed screening in a 3rd Avenue cinema across the street from Bloomingdales. I think it was released on a Friday and withdrawn on the following Wednesday. Maybe that wasn’t a fair release but it was and is a terrible film. Seeing the full-length version recently confirmed that judgment and with some thirty years more experience watching and writing about films I am better able to articulate why.
LURED aka PERSONAL COLUMN
LURED (1947) is interestingly enough, the most Germanic film Douglas Sirk directed in the US. It’s not in his pre-war style, which was at least, on a superficial level, light and happy, no matter the dark world underneath in the human psyche. Rather this seems to be set in a certain milieu familiar to German filmgoers for the ‘20s and ‘30s – urban paranoia. The settings are a dance hall, police headquarters, night clubs, concerts, we see men wearing evening dress and “ein zilender”, black top hats, cigarette holders, the whole urban life which mixed French Fuillelades and urban decadence. Fritz Lang was the master poet of this genre whose films standout so much as individual works (“M”) that it’s difficult to envisage as an integrated genre. Try watching this film and ignore the English dialogue and it looks like one of these German crime films. The scenes in Scotland Yard with its strange antiquated high tech devices like the map case with its retinue of city maps. There are always maps in Lang’s films, especially considering the fact that for Lang the dark world underneath is also very literal.
UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE
The writer of the source material for this film, the novel UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE, Bel Kaufman, was Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem’s granddaughter. She was also the film’s “technical adviser”. She was my homeroom and English teacher at Taft High School in The Bronx circa 1960. Decades later when she was interviewed she admitted that she deliberately ignored the boys in her classes so she could concentrate on teaching the girls. Only the girls.
I AM AN AMERICAN
By its nature, propaganda is sly. However sometimes it is pure and unvarnished propaganda. When it’s believed that the message is so urgent that there is no shame involved in presenting the message as directly and robustly as possible.